Infertility: Will you conquer the Kingdom of Chile or simply sit at home waiting?

Welcome to 2012! May this year be a year in which your wings spread farther than they have ever ventured, and your heart open to embrace what’s waiting just on the other side of this moment.

A few days ago I was reading a book by Isabel Allende. It is fictional and set in the 1500’s. Following is an excerpt that stuck with me last night as the clock moved me into my next life’s great adventure:

“Now, when I can look back and observe my whole life from the serenity of my old age, I understand that the true blessing was to deny me motherhood and thus allow me to fulfill an exceptional destiny. With children I would have been tied down, as we women are. WIth children I would have stayed in Pasencia, abandoned by Juan de Malaga, sewing and making empanadas. With children, I would not have conquered the Kingdom of Chile.”

I know from the beginning of the book that the main character, Ines, does end up having a daughter, though I’ve yet to learn just how.

I share this excerpt today, on the dawn of a new year’s possibility, to encourage all of us to look back into the now, long before we have reached the wisdom of our old age, and seek to understand the blessing, yes I did say the blessing, that infertility has come to us to bestow.

I know it is hard I, I know firsthand that to see the good through all of the difficulty can feel like a herculean task. Yet it is there no less, just under the surface.

One of the wisest things someone ever said to me was “time is going to pass no matter what, you can’t stop it. So while it’s passing you can either take full advantage of it, or you can sit there and do nothing, waiting.”

Time is passing, the days are going by like wheat fields out the passenger window on a long road trip through Iowa. What will you do with that time?

You may not conquer the Kingdom of Chile, yet you may become the next great novelist, have your photographs published in the National Geographic, or even forever change the life of an elderly relative, friend or stranger by simply spending time reading to them or holding their hand. You may soothe newborn babies by rocking them in the neonatal nursery, or open your home through foster as a temporary haven for the next President of the United States on her way to her forever family.

There are so many ways that you can change the world, that you were meant to change the world. Perhaps infertility has stumbled onto your path as a blessing, a blessing to alter your route, and to bring you to the place in the world in which you were meant to make your mark.

You will be a mother, if this is your deepest desire, you will be a mother. In the meantime, will you conquer the Kingdom of Chile or simply sit at home making empanadas and waiting?